I still wonder who had the idea to have the dreamcast controller cable coming out from the bottom when the console is often if not always in front of the player.

I remember how annoying it was on this one:

Painkillers are free if you're brave enough

It was bad enough that they had that little notch on the VMU holder the cable could sit in to mimic coming out the top.

My guess is they didn't want to route the cable around all the VMU stuff internally, so they just had it come out the bottom instead. There was a little divot that you could clip the cable into that pointed it forward if it really bothered you, but it really made no difference either way.